Superlatives in Dubai

Arriving in Dubai in the dark is like I have always imagined it feels to arrive in Las Vegas. It's pitch dark, nothing out there - no snaking highways lit by streetlights in the early hours of the morning, no small towns - then suddenly there is light, a lot of it, and in the middle, the strip of the runway.

By the time I've landed and have negotiated immigration and the tour agency that forgot I was coming, it's light and the city is laid out below me as I travel from the airport to the city centre by sky rail. It feels like a building site, or rather, it is a building site, and the sky rail twists and turns between and under glass and chrome, and past the occasional sand-coloured suburb. There's not far to go though, which feels strange; my knowledge of Dubai as a booming Middle Eastern city, which has come from glossy magazines and documentaries on 7-star hotels, hasn't prepared me for what is actually a very small collection of homes and businesses.

I had planned to leave the city on a tour of oases and seaside villages, but as the tour agency has messed up, I end up spending the whole day in amongst the the excesses and luxuries of the capitalist capital of the world. The excesses can be extreme, and pretty odd when you consider them - why, in a place with rather a lot of available space, would you build tall buildings? Or, in a region with a bit of a lack of water, develop a golf course? People are strange in their pursuit of self-aggrandisement and pleasure.

So I spend my time exploring some of the ways in which Dubai is superlative.

The tallest building in the world.

It's pretty big. It's more than 800 metres high, and the lift, when we stop at the top, actually has the number "124" after the word "Floor". It's kinda cool.

Also, the biggest aquarium in the world...

...with the largest collection of sand tiger sharks in the world...

...and the biggest single panel of glass in the world...

...situated in a shopping mall that contains an entire taxi fleet.

The world's most luxurious shopping malls - even the smaller ones...

...the world's cleanest subway stations...

And, I expect, the world's tallest Model-Of-Burj-Khalifa-Made-Out-Of-Ferrero-Rocher.

It's a pretty remarkable place, really, a strip of hyper-development in the middle of the sands of the desert. Being well-acquainted with the airport, it's interesting to finally get outside and see the city. At least, the malls, although I do sit on the sky rail a lot as well. And the malls are truly something to see. Whatever shop you've got down your street, the Dubai Mall's got a bigger and better one. Really. Nando's. Marks & Spencers. Cold Storage. That Irish pub you've all got nearby. There's even a Bloomingdale's - although at first I don't realise I've seen Rachel's iconic place of work because here, it's in Arabic.

Towards sunset, I get on the train to go to the Creek, which sounds nice and simple and deserty, but when I get to the stop before the one I want, the train stops and everyone is asked to leave the carriages. I hesitantly approach the men at the exits, who laugh and tell me it's been closed for some time, the Creek stop. "Why?" I ask. "Because there's nothing there!" they laugh. I point to the entry in my mini guidebook that has it as a pleasant place to sit by the river and watch the sun go down. "Oh yes!", they laugh, "No! Closed down, no longer, finished, go somewhere else." So I go somewhere else.

I stumble on what appears to be The Creek, anyway; there's an open-air museum on the side, with clay houses and camels and calligraphy exhibitions, and it's rather nice after all the glass and steel to see a bit of raw ground. It's not quite real, though - sort of charmingly clinical. It's a bit like Sun City outside Johannesburg - 100% African, and yet not African at all...

Eventually it's time to get back to the airport for my flight onward to Malaysia. It's been interesting, but I'm looking forward to being able to stand outside for ten minutes without requiring air conditioning as a matter of medical urgency. I never imagined a year ago that I would consider Borneo to have a pleasant temperature, but Dubai's been extreme in more ways than one.